Many mobile telephones have come to include browsers capable of interpreting content written in a markup language such as CHTML (Compact HyperText Markup Language), and communication environments in which mobile telephone users can obtain and browse various types of information from the Internet in the same manner as when using personal computers are continually being developed. Against this background, where such environments are being developed, businesses called “content providers”, which store various mobile telephone content in a server on the Internet and distribute that content, are appearing. However, among such businesses, there are also many malicious parties that provide content intended to charge users improperly, force the dissemination of information, and so on, against the intentions of the mobile telephone user. JP 2004-178512A can be given as a document disclosing a scheme for supporting the prevention of the inadvertent access of such content from malicious content providers. According to the content browsing device disclosed in this document, when an object (icon) such as a pointer or cursor moves onto an element within content obtained from a certain URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and displayed, and that element is hyperlinked to a different URL, an outline, attributes, or the like of the content to which the hyperlink leads is displayed as a pop-up. Adding this scheme to a preexisting mobile telephone makes it possible for a user to understand, in advance, whether the content to which the hyperlink leads is provided by a malicious content provider. JP 2005-32041A, JP 2004-46478A, and JP 2000-276471A also disclose similar techniques.
However, according to the schemes disclosed in the aforementioned documents, when displaying the content present at a hyperlink that leads to a different URL, the mobile telephone cannot perform the pop-up display without also acquiring definition data that defines the outline, attributes, and so on of the content to which the hyperlink leads. A problem may therefore arise in that the communication processing performed by the mobile telephone will increase due to the acquisition of the definition data.
Having been devised in light of the aforementioned background, it is an object of the present invention to provide a scheme that issues a warning in response to an operation about to be performed by a user, without increasing the processing load of the terminal apparatus.